Sunday, May 6, 2012

Berkeley Joins the Firing Squad on Public Higher Education

UC Berkeley has now joined the
short-sighted and irresponsible coalition that seems bent on killing off
California’s finest public institution, the University of California. Out-going
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who has starred as a bumbling, destructive
idiot in the campus’
dramas over the last several years, has for some time been a proponent
of Berkeley going its own way. The
state Republican Party has been promoting an aggressive programme of
disinvestment from California’s education sector, with a particular emphasis on
starving California’s world-renown higher education sphere of funds. The six-figure consultants, hired by UC’s gutless
administrators even as the campus sacks lecturers and folds up academic
departments, have reached similar conclusions: that UC in general and Berkeley
in particular should look for ways to abandon their status as public
institutions and transform themselves into mercenary, for-profit
service-providers.

One proposal that has cropped up
repeatedly in the course of this sordid conversation has been that UC campuses
be allowed to charge differential
tuition. Berkeley’s administrators,
heading the top-ranked of the campuses, have been particularly eager to embrace
such a strategy, which would spell the end of the UC system and signal the
abandonment of its public mission.

The Sacramento
Bee published a story which illustrates the character of the alternative
universe in which proponents of privatisation reside. Moody’s
Investors Service, a ratings agency, cited the “uniqueness of individual
campuses” as one reason why differential tuition would be a “‘credit positive
for UC’”. In a flow of corporate-speak,
Moody’s suggested that the “‘system’s leading campuses could better utilize
their market potential to generate new student revenues and offset continuing
reductions in state support [harnessing UC’s] considerable untapped pricing
power’”.

Of course individual campuses are unique
in some respects. But the whole point of
the University of California is that students should be educated at all of the
campuses to a rigorous academic standard, a goal that I think is achieved
pretty well in spite of the greater fame of the likes of Berkeley and
UCLA. Moody’s rationalisation of robbing
Californians of their wonderful university system also completely ignores that
UC is a public good. It was created by
the investment of time, energy, and tax dollars belonging to Californians, in
order to serve our state’s students and society. It is not about a bottom line, and it is not
about making a profit.

Mass public education, after all, will
never yield a tangible economic return...not one to which you can attach a
dollar-sign and a number. But it yields
something far more important, and something that the most profitable privatised
education system could not yield: a large number of educated citizens whose
social and economic possibilities have been inescapably widened, and whose
lives have been enriched. It brings
together people from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, and puts
them on an equal footing in terms of their qualifications and intellectual
heft. It allows researchers to undertake
projects in the spirit of free scientific and intellectual inquiry rather than standing
cap-in-hand before corporations and industries to do their bidding in aid of
short-term trends and profits (English academics are being forced down this
sorry road by privatisation).

It’s extraordinary how this corporate
gibberish stands so removed from the central, human aspect of an educational
endeavour. The University of California
is not about “pricing power” or “market potential”. It is about the power of public service and
the promotion of human potential. But rather
than harness the existing human energy and potential which its campuses
command, UC’s administrators, both at the campus and UCOP levels, have opted to
violate the University’s public charter by pricing increasing numbers of
Californians out and increasing the number of out-of-state students (at the
expense of Californians).

In a “tit-for-tat” kind of mentality,
their actions make sense, because Californians (particularly comparatively
well-off elderly and middle-aged and middle-class voters who benefited from the
state’s public sphere in their youths) have
already violated their contract with UC by starving the system of funds and
forcing it to begin treating students like customers who are welcome only if
they can pay (many receive financial aid, but exorbitant textbook prices and
ridiculous costs of living remain a deterrent, and high fees deter
first-in-their-family attendees). To be
fair, Californians haven’t been given the opportunity to give UC a “thumbs-up”
or “-down” yet. But they have been
content to condone a political structure which empowers an ever more delusional
right-wing fringe, comprised of oath-swearing economic fundamentalists, and
they have made their disapproval of either increased taxation or the rational reform
of Proposition 13 unclear.

But even in the face of this small-minded
disinvestment, one would have hoped that real proponents of public higher
education would have launched a serious effort to marshal alumni, current
students, parents, and the public at large in support of UC. Instead, UC’s lackadaisical President, Mark “it’s
like being manager of a cemetery” Yudof, launched a fund-raising and
letter-writing campaign, demonstrating the same pathetic amateurism,
extraordinarily limited vision, and total misunderstanding of California’s
politics that have characterised
most of his efforts.

Undoubtedly the state of affairs at UC
would trouble me less if I didn’t have to see it all up close—the obscene remuneration
to administrators during a time of cuts, the slashing of departments and
courses, the skyrocketing tuition, the nastiness in so much public
commentary. And it would be less
personal if UC wasn’t a home to me, and if I haven’t seen, every day for the
last eight years, what a wonderful institution it is, a real testament to the
power of a community to invest in its future.

It’s been hard enough seeing the anti-public
brigade, the hateful right-wing commentators, an ill-informed public, and disloyal
administrators sandbagging California’s preeminent public institution. It’s worse when the very structures and
interests created by public disinvestment cause the University to turn on
itself, ransacking the values and make-up of an institution and an idea about
human potential which has until now been—and should remain—the property of the
people of California.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.